Green is Global Leadership Conference

The 21st Century Learning Initiative www.21learn.org

www.born-to-learn.org

The Eden Project, 12 - 13 June 2011

The 21st Century Learning Initiative - www.21learn.org

Over 800 lectures…

…in over 40 countries

Based on my book...

Overschooled but Undereducated

Knowing What We Now Know...John Abbott

V.E. Day 1945

A quality education is like a three-legged stool which can balance, on any surface however rough, providing the legs are the same length – home school and community

“I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices , public and private, of peace and war”

John Milton 1642

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

John Donne 1624

“The roots of civilisation are twelve inches deep”; discuss

1957 Suez Crisis

Conscription, National Service

Mock Oxbridge Scholarship PaperAutumn 1957

‘In our concentration on academic performance we lose sight of our main business of educating human personality.’

(TES September 1959)

‘All considerations of the curriculum should consider “how best to use subjects for the purpose of education... rather than regarding education as the by-product of the efficient teaching of subjects”.’

(Sir Phillip Morris, 1952)

Island of Ulva, 1962

“If you are born on a mere speck of land in the middle of the ocean you quickly discover

how things work, and why people do as they do. Learn that lesson well, and you are equipped to become a citizen of the world.”

“The idea that talents are lent for the service of others and not given, and that knowledge should bring humility and a sense of involvement in mankind, has to be the necessary corrective to the arrogance of meritocrats, for without this the School’s record of academic success would be indeed alarming.”

P.G Mason, High MasterManchester Grammar School, 1965“Dare to be wise”

Citizen of the world?

The Troubled World of 2011• There are now two and a half times as many people on the Earth’s surface as

when I was born just before the outbreak of World War Two.

• At the most recent count, about 7,000 people (One hundred millionth of the world’s population) owns more than over 3 billion people, (just under half the population).

• 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day.

• The richest 20% of the world’s population receives 75% of the world’s income while the poorest 40% receive only 5% or the world’s income.

• Of the world’s largest 150 economic entities, 95 are corporations (63.3%). Wal-Mart, with revenue of $287.99 billion, is the largest corporation on the planet, and ranks number 22 on the list. The United States is the world’s largest economy with a total economic output in 2004 of $11,667,515,000,000.The 21st Century Learning Initiative -

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“If civilisation is to survive it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature. Ecological markers suggest that in the early 1960’s, humans were using 70% of nature’s yearly output; by the early 1980’s we’d reached 100%; and in 1999 we were at 125%.” A Short History of Progress, 2004

The Ultimate Ecological Crisis

“Our enormously productive economy...demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego-satisfaction, in consumption... We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever accelerating rate.” quoted in ‘The Waste Makers’, 1960

On September 14th 2011, half a century later, the largest shopping centre in Europe – Westfield Stratford – was opened as the only gateway to the Olympic Park of 2012; in floor area it is 20 times that of St Paul’s Cathedral.

‘British family life is in crisis’ proclaimed the Telegraph last week. ‘It is parents who are to blame who by working like pit ponies to house our offspring,

feed them and keep them in with the latest digital cameras and micros scooters, it seems we have created a generation of miserable children who are wallowing in materialism. We spend £7.3 billion on toys in children's bedrooms, when what they really need is to play outside with friends and family.

“Tell me and I forget; show me and I

remember; let me do, and I understand.”

Confucius, 551-479 BC

The 21st Century Learning Initiative - www.21learn.org

How do we learn?C

Subsidiarity

“It is wrong for a superior tokeep to itself the right of making decisions for which an inferior is

perfectly capable of doing for itself.”

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The 21st Century Learning Initiative - www.21learn.org

Time is going by"The biggest crisis we are facing is a Crisis of Meaning. The tremendous social changes of the last 100 years have stripped modern society of that which gives us meaning be it in our roots to our ancestors, religions, spirituality, our relationship to nature...... Within this Crisis of Meaning our young people are facing a MORAL crisis - a crisis of values. Without these anchors young people no longer understand the value of perseverance, learning for learning's sake etc.. Instead our daily lives are filled with a pursuit of money and temporary ecstasy. Both of these goals are unfulfillable and result in a misguided frenzy in the pursuit of the next thrill, or in depression.

E-mail from Dr Rolando JubisPsychologist and CounselorJakarta International School, 11/11/00

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The 21st Century Learning Initiative - www.21learn.org

Asked on 1st January 2000 what chance he gave the world of surviving the next thousand years, Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and later President of the Royal Society said; “I’m not sure about the next millennium but I think I give us a 50/50 chance of surviving the next hundred years. I fear that the speed of man’s technological discoveries is outpacing our wisdom and ability to control what we have discovered…”

When our first granddaughter was born a year ago, our doctor said with great pleasure “she has a 25 % chance of living to the age of 100”.

For her to do that we have to educate the next generation to bring technological knowledge and wisdom together.

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, Rains from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts....They lie unquestioned, uncombined.Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill Is daily spun, but there exists no loom To weave it into fabric.

Edna St. Vincent Millay "Huntsman, What Quarry"

The 21st Century Learning Initiative - www.21learn.org

“There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune...”The 21st Century Learning Initiative -

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“...But omitted, and the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries...”

The 21st Century Learning Initiative - www.21learn.org

“... On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves -- or lose the ventures before us.”

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3

The 21st Century Learning Initiative - www.21learn.org

For further information:

Web www.born-to-learn.orgwww.21learn.org

Email mail@21learn.org

The 21st Century Learning Initiative - www.21learn.org

Breakout Groups

1. Preparing young people to think about education in a very different fashion; developing the ability to think, communicate, collaborate and make decisions

2. Preparing ourselves to devise strategies that go with ‘the grain of the brain’; education as the precursor to a functional democracy

3. Building communities that accept responsibility to uses all their resources to support the development of young people; cognitive apprenticeship, and Subsidiarity

4. Helping society in general to understand the need to reverse an upside down and inside-out system of schooling so as to prepare young people more effectively to stand o their own two feet

5. ‘Ill fares the land, where wealth accumulates and men decay’ (Oliver Goldsmith); helping the next generations to live in a post-capitalist society.

The 21st Century Learning Initiative - www.21learn.org

Crazy by DesignWe have long suspected that there is something going on in the brain of the adolescent, apparently involuntarily, that is forcing apart the child/parent relationship. Adolescence is a period of profound structural change, in fact “the changes taking place in the brain during adolescence are so profound, they may rival early childhood as a critical period of development”, wrote Barbara Strauch in 2003. “The teenage brain, far from being readymade, undergoes a period of surprisingly complex and crucial development.

The 21st Century Learning Initiative - www.21learn.org

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The adolescent brain is crazy by design.”

So What Now?

Formal schooling, therefore, has to start a dynamic process through which students are progressively weaned from their dependence on teachers and institutions, and given the confidence to manage their own learning, collaborating with colleagues as appropriate, and using a range of resources and learning situations.

The 21st Century Learning Initiative - www.21learn.org

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‘In our concentration on academic performance we lose sight of our main business of educating human personality.’

(TES September 1959)

‘All considerations of the curriculum should consider “how best to use subjects for the purpose of education... rather than regarding education as the by-product of the efficient teaching of subjects”.’

(Sir Phillip Morris, 1952)

A model of learning is needed which would match exactly the neurological progression of the brain of the young child as it transforms itself into the adolescent brain. Adolescents, it seems, have evolved to be apprentice-like learners, not pupils sitting at desks awaiting instruction.